So You Want to be a Gamesmaster - Book Review

Although time has been incredibly tight over the last week or so, in any gaps I have had I have been reading (and making notes on!) Justin Alexander's new book about being a Gamesmaster in a role-playing game, So You Want to be a Gamesmaster.  I am a big fan of his blog and Youtube channel but reagrdless, this is a superb book for those players who want to be, or are, gamesmasters. 

It is a detailed guide on how to prepare and run the vast majority of the types of adventure and campaign that you might want to. All the advice is specific and actionable. It provides guidelines and scaffolding for the design, with lots of practical tips, notes on how the preparation interacts with the roleplaying and rulings on the table - and importantly, the limitations and constraints inherent in the different adventure types. For example, wilderness travel might be best played via a 'route' adventure, a hexcrawl, a pointcrawl...or just 'the party arrives after 5 days of travel' and it explains why you might choose one over another in a given situation. The section on writing mystery adventures is genuinely superlative, as are some of the techniques around urban adventures. Just reading it made me start sketching out some mysteries and some campaign ideas to run at my table.

It isn't a book which re-invents the wheel or radically changes how we think about adventures. What it does is show, in the simplest terms, so the newest GM can follow, is how each type of scenario works, how you can build one which will work, and if you want, how it can be incorporated into a campaign which can vary from the simple and effective to the almost incredibly subtle and complex.
The book is rounded off with lots of sound and subtle GM advice on all kinds of things, from when and how to split the party, how much (or little) to prep, which types of adventure or campaign use the most prep and which the least, and when that prep is best done, how to roleplay parties and combats...all kinds of things.
It is entirely system agnostic, although with more nods to D&D than any other individual system. No type of system is left out.
The writing is friendly, clear and witty. The tone is spot on, certainly not taking itself too seriously but the author's enthusiasm for this form of entertainment is absolutely infectious. It is honestly the best book of its type I have read - it is a little difficult to imagine how it could be better at what it does. I am a bit sorry in a way that this review perhaps sounds a bit gushing in case that puts people off reading it. Don't be! If this is a subject you are interested in, it gets the highest possible recommendation.

T2000 Hexcrawl Campaign

Although most of my gaming time recently has been spent on GM'ing Shadowrun, I have found a bit of time for some Twilight 2000 gaming too. Once I got the procedures more sorted out, it became apparent that the setting and mechanics really lend themselves to hex-crawling.

 

I started the game using the more exciting beginning suggested in T2000 1e, where the characters start off just after the destruction of US 5 Division around Kalisz, rather than the 2e alternative which suggests that the characters start a few weeks later, having successfully hidden up until the action dissipated. I think the danger and excitement of the first is much superior.

In any case, the group consists of:

Jay (an English infantryman)

Barbara (a Polish medic)

Jose (an Hispanic American mechanic)

Karl-Friedrich (a German panzer crewman)

Elizabeth (a US Engineer officer)

The group begins with a 3/4t truck and a 2&1/2t truck.

Moving South from Kalisz, the group encounter 5 refugees. The encounter is pretty hostile (the refugee leader is both brutal and ruthless) but violence is avoided.  The party decide to move on quickly, feeling fairly sure that the refugees will inform local Soviet forces about them.

 

In the woods between Kalisz and Wielun,  the group finds an abandoned BMP-1. Although hardly in pristine condition, with some good work, Jose gets it up and running. 

Later the group find a derelict convoy of a UAZ-469, a 5t truck and a 3/4t truck outside some woods north of Prazka. Jose manages to get the UAZ-469 running, whilst stripping the trucks for parts. Since they have no need for a BMP-1 gunner at this point (no ammunition), then the group can handle driving the four vehicles.

 

North of Krzepice, the group encounters a couple of stragglers. Although Polish, the pair are happy to exchange news and cigarettes through Barbara. Their story is that they have nothing left to be loyal too - they are headed towards Krakow to seek their fortunes.

The rest of the day and the following day is spent on rest, maintenance and foraging/alcohol production. Whilst out doing the latter, the group finds another derelict convoy: 3 trucks and a UAZ-469 in various states of disrepair; they do contain some useful 73mm and 9mm ammunition though. They are all stripped for parts.

Shortly after, a Marauder group of 9 is encountered. Happily the leader has no real interest in fighting another group in a similar position (especially as the PCs got the drop on him) so is happy to talk. They apparently deserted after their senior officer started ordering his troops to carry out massacres in a seemingly random fashion.  Things end happily when Jose suggests that he could fix up one of the abandoned trucks in exchange for an AT-3 Sagger possessed by the marauders. This is agreed, and the exchange is made.

In the evening, the group gets going again, and finds a Soviet repair yard poorly concealed NE of Krzepice.  A quick attack with the BMP quickly kills one of the Soviets and wounds another 3, including the commander: the remaining 6 run off. There are two vehicles, a BRDM-4 and a BTR-80 but wasting no time, the group simply takes some machinegun ammunition and spare parts and quickly heads off to find somewhere secure to camp. They take the wounded prisoners and treat them.

During the night, the group spots a Soviet field hospital (horse-drawn) about 2km away, just setting up.  At dawn, the group approach. Although initially a bit difficult, the group trades the 3/4t truck for some medical supplies and hands over the wounded prisoners - except one, Yevhen, who decides to stay with the group. It turns out he is Ukrainian and claims just to want to get home and thinks he has a better chance this way. 

Trusting that the medical staff and prisoners will keep their word not to inform on them, the group is a bit perturbed to find a couple of trucks, one towing a Rapira anti-tank gun heading their way soon after. The group evades them into the woods; and since the Soviets weren't keeping a great lookout, they concluded it was merely chance.

The remainder of the day is given over to resting, foraging and producing alcohol. Jay manages to kill a wild boar for dinner!

The next day (day 4), just after dawn, the group encounters quite a large group of refugees (30) on the road SW of Krzepice. It turns out that they are looking for a promising place to start a new village and rebuild their lives. the group gifts them some medical supplies.

 

In the mid-morning, the group accidentally blunder into a Soviet supply dump, a bit too well concealed in a patch of woods West of Czestochowa.  There are 6 guards, all armed with AKMs. Both sides are surprised, but the PCs recover first: Jay shoots the leader, and the second round goes right through his forehead.  A gun battle commences but with the support of the BMP, the result isn't in doubt and after one more Soviet guards is killed and another is wounded, the remainder surrender - after patching up the wounded guard, the group let them go with their weapons and food.  The supply dump is full of ammunition and the group take their fill of Soviet ammunition types. The group then put a few kilometres of distance between them and the site, in case the guards are able to find reinforcements quickly.

Game Notes: The group has generally had the run of the green so far; most of the encounters haven't been too dangerous and they have generally had the option about whether to initiate or avoid combat. The only unavoidable instances of the latter have been when they have almost literally driven into concealed supply dumps! The processes have gone pretty smoothly although there are a couple of areas I have needed to add stuff, clarify struff or tighten up some stuff. 

This is quite a 'procedural' form of hex-crawl. What I need to do next is to stock this portion of the map with some additional, slightly richer possible encounters. There is some useful information in the sourcebooks and also in 1e for this. One weakness in T2000 considered as a campaign is that the published scenarios seem to push for the group to go towards Krakow then Warsaw first, there is actually very little reason to do that. Given the stated goals - for American and Western European characters to get home, for instance - there doesn't seem to be any overwhelming reason to do so.  One possibility might be for the scenario hook into the 'Free City of Krakow' to be presented quite early on during the characters' escape from Kalisz.

That said, the procedural generation of encounters and situations has been quite fun so far. Some of the sub-systems are a bit calculation-heavy but nothing too effortful, as long as you are clear about the structure you are trying to follow.

Rewards & Rewards in Shadowrun & Other Games

No, there isn't a typo in the title - it is rather a nod to two separate ideas of reward.  All will become clear...

Because game money cannot be converted into real money, then the main rewards that can be given to players is new abilities. Whether these abilities are 'skills' or 'equipment' is functionally quite irrelevant: they both increase the ability levels of the character that the player is playing, and thus expand the scope of what is possible for both player and character within the confines of the game.

Original D&D famously tied advancement to money (or treasure anyway); magic items and killing monsters also provided a route to advancement but since they were obtained in the same way, that doesn't change anything important here. It got some stick for doing this but it had one great advantage: the reward to the characters and the players was very directly for doing the things that they ought (in the premise of the game) to be doing. In my opinion, it also provided a very useful degree of moral hazard: it was perfectly possible to play a bad - or very bad - character simply because the incentive to do so readily existed: optimize for getting more money, whether from friend or foe.

Later RPGs and D&D itself moved away from this but something important was lost: the reward system tended to become more complex, nebulous or both; whereas the OD&D approach basically successfully optimized the reward system to the essence of the game. Complex systems tended fundamentally to want to model some kind of 'real world' process for skill improvement whilst nebulous systems that rewarded 'good roleplaying' were intrinsically subject to GM fiat and caprice as well as, potentially, creating tension at the table since 'playing in character' as a player goal can interact quite badly with other players, although doubtless some groups really thrived off this.

 

And so to Shadowrun.  Shadowrun is a game dominated by money, since it is in a world dominated by money - even more than the present. The tag line from 5e, Everything Has a Price, kind of epitomizes this. So there might be quite a good case for linking 'Karma' awards in Shadowrun to money, with the big-earning characters definitionally playing in the big leagues, so to speak, whereas 'street-level' characters earning street-level money would be slower to advance (and hopefully, face lower odds). What this might be precisely is open for debate and experimentation, but maybe 10000Y per karma point might be a good start point.

However, there is another use for money in Shadowrun and that is to track 'reputation' - think 'Reward' as in Wanted: Dead or Alive.  The value to/for/or against a corporation, or any other organization in the Shadowrun world can be tracked via nominal money gained or lost.  And given the nature of the corporation in the Shadowrun world, this makes a lot of literal sense: everything would be done on a cost/benefit basis. This is in addition to any other considerations: killing someone's family in the course of a run goes above and beyond the money, but that motivation applies to family and friends, not the 'organization' as a whole (and especially not a corporation). And this creates a specific mechanic that players can take advantage of: is their beef really with the thrill gang, or just with a few members? And if the players benefited the rest of the gang to the extent that they were in a positive relationship...well, that could be very interesting in terms of roleplaying. Conversely, it also gives an incentive to limit the damage - why generate pointless emnity by ratcheting up the Nuyen cost even more...unless, of course, your other friends are secretly delighted by this. In any case, I have been using it in my current Shadowrun campaign and it is working nicely as a way of tracking who friend and foe is, and who will get out of bed to make their life a misery, and to whom they are just too insignificant to even watch.  As a last thing, it could/should/would determine the resources that an organization would expend to get them, but I haven't made that procedural yet. Coming soon.

Firing Fully Automatic: when should it be done?

Chris Turner, British paratrooper, is at the corner of a solid stone farmhouse. Three Polish scouts are approaching, unawares.  Chris opens fire, fully-automatic, at about 30m distance…

 I am quite interested in when it is optimal for characters in 'modern'-themed role-playing games to  use automatic fire from assault rifles and submachineguns. My impression was that in some games it is pretty much always pointless, and in others nearly always optimal.  My initial survey somewhat confirms this...

In Twilight 2000 2.2, Chris has a Small Arms Asset of 16 (Strength 8 + Small Arms (Rifle) 8).  He is carrying an M16A2, with the following stat-line.

Weapon	M16A2				Recoil		Rng
ROF	Damage	Pen	Blk	Mag	SS	Brst
3	3	1-Nil	5	20/30	3	5	55

Chris can fire up to 5 bursts per round, each of 3 bullets (the weapon’s ROF). He fires a fully automatic burst at each Polish scout.  The range is short (under the printed range).

Each round counts as an ‘Impossible’ shot, i.e. resolved at ¼ of the asset, 4.

No rounds are lost from each burst due to range.  Total recoil is 15-8 for a total of 7, however, which is more than the number of shots in the burst. Therefore the fire is wasted!

However, if Chris fires two bursts, the total recoil is 2; these 2 shots are taken from each burst, thus Chris only rolls for one hit with each.  He is better off staying with single-shot.

But if Chris fires only a single burst, then he will get to fire all three shots, even if he only hits on a 4 or less.  If he had fired three single shots, he would hit on a 15 or less with each.

However, supposing he is with Jason, a driver who has an asset of 12, but greater Strength (10).  If Jason fires two bursts, he would get to roll six dice.  He would need a 3 or less to hit on each of them.

Usually single-shot fire is much better than automatic fire in Twilight 2000; this is particularly true for ROF 3 weapons. But imagine Doug is a British soldier, who has Strength 12 and an overall asset of 16.  He could fire two bursts of 5 rounds, for 10 rolls needing a 4 (i.e. a 20% chance) or more to hit.  He could still fire 4 rounds single-shot, but each hitting on a 16 or less (i.e. 80% chance).  Doug is still more likely to hit with the single-shots. This equation only changes a little at longer ranges: John’s hit chances will go down, but the number of effective bullets from the bursts goes down too. 

The only really useful thing is that the bullets that don’t hit the target might hit anyone else who moves in the vicinity, so it at least has some kind of potential suppressive effect.

 

 In Twilight 2000 1e, things work in a very different way.  Essentially every 'shot' of ROF represents 3 rounds fired for most weapons - you can work out exactly how many by the number they have divided the number of bullets in a magazine by.  Our M16 has a magazine of 10 rather than 30, so each shot represents 3 rounds fired.  The chances of hitting at 30m are 48% for each of the four shots, so not too awful for Chris in these rules. Incidentally, if I recall the rules correctly, if Chris spends a turn aiming, his first shot is fired at a 96% chance of hitting.

If the same situation took place in Shadowrun1e, imagine Chris has a Firearms skill of 6.  He is armed with an FN-HAR assault rifle; this has a 20-round magazine and a Damage code of 5M3; and it also comes with integral laser sight and gas-vent recoil compensator (2).  30m counts as medium range in Shadowrun 1e for an assault rifle, so the base target number is 5.

On fully automatic fire in Shadowrun, the number of bullets fired can be up to firearms skill +1, so in this case 7.  However, the number of shots is applied as modifier to the required target number: in this case it would move it up to 12. 2 points of this can be offset by the stabilizers on the FN-HAR, leaving the final target number as 10.  Chris rolls 6 dice for each round (i.e. 7 times) requiring a 6, then a 4 or more on the additional die rolled for throwing a 6 (i.e. a 1-in-12 chance).  It would be much more effective for Chris to limit himself to two shots, where he has 6 dice and only needs to score a single 5 or 6 to achieve a hit. And he has a reasonable chance of getting the 3 hits he needs to shift the damage from ‘Medium’ to ‘Serious’.

If the FN-HAR is the ‘smart-gun’ version, then bursts are much more worth it: one could try 4 shots and there is a quite decent chance of taking down an unarmoured target.

The damage code of 5M3 indicates the ‘Power level’, the ‘Wound Category’ and the ‘Staging Number’.  The ‘Power level’ is the Target number for anyone hit by the fire to try and reduce the damage of the attack; the ‘Wound Category’ is the base level of damage the weapon does; and the ‘Staging Number’ is the number of additional successes either the attacker or the defender need to change the ‘Wound Category’ up or down.  Interestingly, Shadowrun rules that the ‘Power level’ increases if a weapon uses automatic fire – but since the bullets are supposed to be rolled for separately, it is difficult to see why this is the case.  To make sense of this, I would suggest that each burst is considered to consist of 3-, 4- or 5- individual bullets.

 

 RECON has a more idiosyncratic system although it does have its points. All weapons of the same type have the same rate of fire; this rate of fire that you roll for is explicitly NOT the same as the number of bullets fired. So all submachineguns can fire 5 ‘shots’ on full automatic; the only modifier is a further -10 to all hit probabilities (which are given in percentages). The RECON 2e rules (i.e. the ones published by Palladium) use a ‘situational’ rather than ‘simulationist’ system, whereby the main modifiers are the combat situation: attackers in  an ambush are likely to roll at nearly their base skill level, those being ambushed fire with big penalties.

So, to go back to our example, Chris has a base skill of 80% with assault rifles. He can fire 5 times on full-automatic.  He can split his fire between the three Polish scouts. Because he is ambushing them, he will roll twice at the first two and once at the third with a 70% chance of hitting.  Ammunition is dealt with in a somewhat ‘quantum’ fashion: everyone has ammunition until they haven’t, the relevant factor being the character’s Alertness rating – more Alert characters pay more attention to their ammo expenditure, less Alert characters blaze merrily away.  This doesn’t affect their likelihood of hitting, just how many stoppages, whether through magazine changes or jams, they have. There is actually quite a lot to be said for this approach, as long as ammunition shortage isn’t a significant tactical factor.  It might be taken into account by demanding a ‘weapons check’ (i.e. a stoppage check) after every occasion on which a character fires fully automatic, but not when they fire on semi-automatic.

Thus there is a fair amount of disagreement about how accurate or not automatic fire is and thus how and when it is most worth using. In very broad terms, the answer seems to be  - always in T2000 1e, very rarely in T2000 v2.2 except when doing a form of area denial or at certain ranges when spray'n'pray works a little better, nearly always in Recon, and a little bit in Shadowrun 1e i.e. to the extent that the weapon is rigged out to avoid recoil, although these rules overall don't seem to make that much sense in any case. 

Twilight 2000 v2.2 - Playing the Game - Clean Procedures & Structures

I have been playing some more Twilight 2000 2nd edition recently and it has been quite fun. The setting has always been reasonably compelling in terms of its premise, and the detail around that premise has been satisfactory enough to get a game out of it.  Mixing military, survival and exploration themes in a plausible way in a modern setting isn't necessarily so easy, but the game gives it a good go.

 

However, elements of the execution of this in practice are not good. I have some issues with character generation, equipment and overall calibration which I will write about another time, but here I want to concentrate much more on how the game is actually played.  I have tried to codify it so it has a more logical flow - please have a look at this page for details.

Fundamentally, Twilight 2000 v2 resembles a hex crawl game.  Unlike a very traditional hex-crawl, the players and characters know the approximate shape of the world and the local environs but not the exact shape or contents. I think there is a hidden premise in the game - there certainly is when I play it - that the Twilight 2000 world both is, and is not, the world of real life. The big cities, even small towns are there, but it doesn't have fidelity down to area/village/street level, so players and GMs aren't expected to research every area in which the world takes place, hence farms and villages can be generated as random encounters. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from trying to take the level of granularity down further especially in the age of Google Maps, but I don't think the expectation in the rules is that you will do that. The level of expectation of fidelity probably - definitely guessing here, based on the scale of the supporting materials - got lower between Twilight 2000 1st edition and 2nd edition, even.

Almost all of the mechanics one would need for a hex crawl are in there: movement rates & quite detailed encounter tables, rules for survival (food, fuel, fatigue, sickness) etc. The most recent version of the game (edition 4, which I have not played yet), because it is explicitly designed as a hex-crawl, has a free hex map of Poland (and Sweden) to download. So 4e recognized the logic of where this game needed to go and went there, which is possibly a vote of confidence in the idea that the same design logic can be applied to earlier versions.

However, although almost all of the individual mechanics are there, the structure is emphatically not. And I am not on about the explicit lack of 2e hex maps or anything as relatively trivially as that. No, I mean the way the rules are organized within the rulebook makes using it generally difficult. They aren't optimized for play; it would be some excuse if they were optimized for learning but they aren't really done that way either, although the organization of the book makes a little bit of sense in terms of the latter. And I think this lack of structure really diminished the amount of times I played it when it was first out: it felt like, it was, quite hard work to get a game out of it compared to games where it was all more obvious what one should do.  When you add in to that the individual complexity of certain mechanics (explosive weapons for instance) then the game just becomes too much, even though most of the individual rules are quite well done and thought out.

The Alexandrian

 I have been really enjoying catching up on The Alexandrian blog (95%+ focused on role-playing games) and on the YouTube Alexandrian channel. I know it has been going for ages, but it was entirely new to me. Although role-playing games have always been part of my gaming - or at least they have for 35 years or so - it has always played third string to miniatures games and board games. However, RPGs have been more prominent for me over the last year, for two reasons: firstly, whenever life gets more stressful, I have tended to increase RPGs and diminish other games; and secondly, most of my children prefer RPGs to wargames in particular, so I have tended to focus more on what they want.  Anyway, I have found a ton of useful and usable advice in The Alexandrian on every aspect of running RPGs - it is proving a brilliant resource in making my current games (Twilight 2000 v2 and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e) much better. So, if you haven't heard of it before, check it out.

WFRP 1e & 2e Careers: The Gamekeeper

The Gamekeeper was one of the better careers in WFRP 1e, particularly for characters who wanted to be proficient with missile weapons. And being proficient with missile weapons is a very sound strategy in WFRP 1e, since hitting the opposition without letting them get close doesn't have many downsides.

GAMEKEEPER (Original 1e):

M

WS

BS

S

T

W

I

A

Dex

Ld

Int

Cl

WP

Fel

+20

+1

+2

+10

Skills: Concealment Rural, Marksmanship, Secret Sign- Poacher (Poachers only), Set Trap, Silent Move Rural, Spot Traps, 50% chance of Secret Language - Ranger (Gamekeepers only), 10% chance of Animal Trainer - Hawk

 

Between the Ballistic Skill advances and the Marksmanship skill, the character is really set up to be an expert at shooting things from a very early point in the game. Plus, one of the Career Exits is Targeteer, so being as good as you can get to be with missile weapons is within very easy reach.  The skills are both useful and a reasonable selection.  The only things I might take issue with is that the career doesn't have an advance available in Initiative:  given that Initiative is the characteristic which controls observation, this seems an omission; and Follow Trail seems like a relevant skill for a Gamekeeper too. If I am being really picky, I am not entirely convinced that the Strength bonus is justified.

 

Of course, this is really a two-for-the-price-of-one career: the Poacher career, being very similar, is embedded within the Gamekeeper career. There isn't much to choose between them - and you can always do both careers if you want to get everything - except that the Targeteer Career Exit is the best on offer, although Scout is fairly reasonable too.

There isn't really an equivalent of the Gamekeeper in WFRP 2e. Liber Fanatica suggested converting Gamekeeper characters to the Peasant career. I can see why it did that in lieu of anything better,, since some of the Peasant skills overlap with those of the Gamekeeper,  but it really isn't a good fit. Conceptually Servant might also have worked, but that isn't very suitable either so this one was genuinely a lost career, which seems a shame.

GAMEKEEPER (2e):

Main Profile
WS	BS	S	T	Ag	Int	WP	Fel
	+20	+5				+10
Secondary Profile
A	W	SB	TB	M	Mag	IP	FP
	+3

Skills: Concealment, Set Trap, Silent Move, Secret Language – Ranger or Animal Trainer - Hawk

Talents: Marksmanship, Rover, Trapfinder

The Liber Fanatica conversion seems fine although a little light on skills: this career has seven-and-a-half skills and 2e careers would typically have eleven. However, we can easily add three of Follow Trail, Perception, Outdoor Survival and/or Search to round out this career nicely.

So for our revised version:

GAMEKEEPER (Revised 1e):

M

WS

BS

S

T

W

I

A

Dex

Ld

Int

Cl

WP

Fel

+20

+2

+10

Skills: Concealment Rural, Marksmanship, Secret Sign- Poacher (Poachers only), Set Trap, Silent Move Rural, Spot Traps, 75% chance of Follow Trail, 50% chance of Secret Language - Ranger (Gamekeepers only), 10% chance of Animal Trainer - Hawk, 10% chance of Fish

I am struggling to persuade myself that a Gamekeeper should get a bonus to Cool, so that has gone too.  Hunter and Trapper can be added to the Career Exits though.